Field
The present disclosure relates generally to network systems, and more specifically, to facilitation of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections between a client device and a server.
Related Art
In related art network systems implementing real time applications, TCP-based communications are utilized between the client device and the server. TCP-based communications may incur undesirable latency over a lossy connection by requiring retransmissions of data packets between the client device and the server.
Such network systems may desire UDP communications. However, related art UDP based systems may be connection-less, in other words, the lifetime of the connection is not manageable. Further, related art UDP-based systems may implement load balancers that do not support or recognize UDP-based transmissions. Even if the load balancer supports UDP, the related art implementations manage the session lifetime by timeouts instead of facilitating an actual connection.
Further, related art systems may not implement UDP. In such scenarios, there may not be any standard protocol to support a shared (e.g., listening) port on server. UDP server ports may also be subject to security issues, such as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Some related load balancers may support UDP load balancing. However, such related art implementations are based on source internet protocol (IP) ‘sticky’ (e.g., forward UDP packets to a specific server process based on the source IP address), of which the lifetime is based on timeouts.